O’Reilly, the organisers of Ubuntu Live, have just issued the call for papers for Ubuntu Live 2008. The theme of the event is “Taking it Further”, which I think is perfect for Ubuntu this year!

The subtitle to the conference should probably be “Going into production at scale”, because it seems everywhere I look these days people are taking Ubuntu into production. Perhaps it’s the preparation for the April LTS release, perhaps its that more and more of their apps and solutions are certified on Ubuntu, or perhaps its just that confidence in Ubuntu for large-scale deployments on the server and the desktop has reached a tipping point, but either way I’m delighted with the ramping up of heavy-duty adoption of the platform that our community delivers with such metronomic precision.

So Ubuntu Live 2008 promises to be informative, as we start to reap the benefits of that experience. If you have interesting deployments or projects that you would like to share, UL2008 would be the right platform to do it! I’d be particularly interested in talks that describe:

large-scale government deployments of Ubuntu on the desktop (there have now been several)

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[…] blog today a call for papers for Ubuntu Live 2008 in Portland (Oregon). You can see his blog here: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/137 O’Reilly, the organisers of Ubuntu Live, have just issued the call for papers for Ubuntu Live […]

Healthcare Supporting Software must be one of the areas most needing that “Ubuntu touch”.

Every piece of Healthcare supporting software has a given associated morbidity and mortality, meaning that any of us may one day be involuntarily carried to a hospital and there be an involuntary victim of bad software.

Picking an open source software package to support Healthcare Information Systems (to use at hospitals, or small clinics, or even private practices) and make it pervasive would be a giant leap forward in Healthcare IT safety both in rich and poor countries.

Poor and rich countries could afford to have proper Clinical IT support software if it seated in a country’s central web server ready to be used by authorized personnel at each of that country’s healthcare facilities, by means of a standard web browser using a standard (private or public) IP connection. The so called interoperability issues and the nonsensical associated “interoperability industry” would be put out of the way by this innovative disruption.

Just to illustrate it in a simple way: make Bazaar manage medical records, serve them using something like PostgreSQL+PHP+Javascript+Apache, and let the final users see a secure and ergonomically designed interface at his current web browser. Use the “wisdom of crowds” to find what are the most needed specs and what is the most reliable way to interface the human being at each end.

It’s weird you aren’t interested in talks about corporate/enterprise deployment of server edition. I’d like to see on UB2008 (if I can make it there) talks about Ubuntu enterprise server deployment since the enterprise business model is much more “share-alike” than RedHat/Novel counterpart and I’d rather have my company to pay for a true free/open-source OS.
It’s hard for me to understand why don’t you focus more on enterprise software certifications. Also, Ubuntu still markets itself as a beginner desktop while it could be much more than this – split the marketing for the two products (desktop/server)!
Ten years ago when I first saw a computer running linux a friend of mine told me a story about this finish guy who was using Unix at his university and tried to do a free operating system that would mimic Unix (which he was accustomed to from the university) to replace MSDOS on his PC. Although apocryphal this story led me to understand why Microsoft fights to get Windows in universities and big companies – people using Windows at school/job would want a similar system at home too. What if some of the companies/universities would ran Ubuntu? I suppose no one would ever want to see Windows again 🙂

Good luck and hopefully I’ll get there and see some enterprise success stories!

PS: I know Ubuntu got a DB2 certification and it’s a good step forward but a long way to go.
PPS: I work in a corporate environment and already pushed some linux boxes to production environment but unfortunately it’s not Ubuntu since some of our software it’s not supported on ubuntu.

I wrote my bits for the case studies for the latter two and these currently go through our internal review process before going to the respective clients, which may well take a month or two. Do you think this might be interesting to the wider Ubuntu community? If this is good enough to get on your case studies page, who in Canonical should I talk to? Steve George maybe?